Friday, January 23, 2009

Multiculturalism is an ideal for many people. You wonder if they realize that every effect has a cause, and then becomes a cause of other effects, and that nothing is static. As a result, you can't design for a static state -- multiculturalism -- but you need to design society for a process.

A neo-Nazi group has joined the state's "Adopt-A-Highway" volunteer litter pickup program, taking advantage of a free speech court fight won four years ago by the Ku Klux Klan.

Two signs noting the group's membership in the Adopt-A-Highway program went up in October but drew attention only recently when the group picked up litter as part of a gathering in Springfield.

The state says it had no way to reject the group's application. A 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling arising from a similar effort by the Ku Klux Klan says membership in the Adopt-A-Highway program can't be denied because of a group's political beliefs. At the time, the state could reject applications for the program from groups that denied membership based on race or had a history of violence.

If we're going to be fair and let the Black Panthers adopt a highway, or the local Mennonites, or the Scientologists, or the Indian-American Sangerbund, or whatever, we're gonna hafta let the Klan do it too.

As time goes on, more groups will demand their rights to do such things, even though they are incompatible with others. Radical Islam? Fundamentalist Christianity? Militant Atheist? Randian Objectivists? They all want a different type of society.

Eventually, enough of one group accumulates in an area that they dominate it -- some would say the Scientologists have already done this in Los Angeles -- and they exclude others because their beliefs are compatible. At first, we're outraged because we assume multiculturalism is the belief that all other beliefs must be compatible with.

But... if you want to make your vision a reality, you need for it to exist in such a way that it influences all aspects of life, and even the design of the civilization in which it exists. So you need your own "monocultural" civilization, whether that's ethno-cultural or religious or secular in nature.

As a result, the logical extension of multiculturalism is that it encourages society to fragment into disparate, increasingly polarized, isolated camps that are alienated from the whole. They perceive the majority, who support multiculturalism, as being devoid of inherent values and so competing with their own -- and we have to admit, they're right.

Look for more exciting breakup of the USA along these lines. Of course, the rest of the world is cheering this on: everyone likes to see a king fall, even if what follows is worse.